Free Tritium Gambit (Max and Miranda Book 1) by Erik Hyrkas

messages from time to time, but you know the cost of a two-way cross galaxy communication—the out of network fees are absolutely ridiculous.” She noticed me looking back to my ring. “Is that from your parents?”
    I cleared my throat and looked away from her. “So, where’s the sheriff?”
    “ He thought you made a good point about the creature. It might not be down here, and so he’s going to look around the top of the cliff.”
    “ Very brave of him,” I said sarcastically.
    Miranda tucked away her rebreather on her belt. “I know, right?”
    I tried not to roll my eyes as I followed her example and put my rebreather away. Miranda pulled her microfiber towel out of a pocket and dried her hair. I was shivering, and so I decided it was a good idea and dried off my hair and exposed skin too. My clothes were designed to dry instantly, but I still felt cold.
    I pulled the small bottle of blue pills from my pocket and popped two into my mouth. “Do you want any?” I held the bottle toward Miranda. “They give you a quick metabolism boost, which can help warm you up.”
    “ No thanks,” she said. “I feel fine. Why do you have pills like that? Are you worried about your figure?”
    I chuckled. “No. They can help me heal faster, too. Good for emergencies. I suppose they could help anybody heal twice as fast, but for most people twice as fast still isn’t sufficient to survive a serious injury.”
    She pulled a Bar-F from her pocket and broke it in half. “Here, eat this. You’ll need the calories.” She handed me half and ate the other.
    I ate it in a bite, grateful for the food. I had been starving, despite what I had said when I refused the soup earlier. That was another risk for me. A high powered metabolism is necessary for rapid healing, but it has its drawbacks. If I don’t eat often, my body will begin to cannibalize muscle, and when it runs low on muscle, it starts to consume organs.
    “ It looks like we’ll go this way.” Miranda indicated a jagged opening leading into the dark. “I’ll leave the glow stick here to help us find our way back to this point, though I’m not entirely sure we can swim out of here.” She unwrapped the thin green glow stick from her wrist and placed it on the floor where it was visible from the cavern she had pointed to.
    We both pulled high-powered LED flashlights from our belts. Miranda had hers pointed right into my eyes when she turned it on and nearly burned out my retinas. Two cheers for regeneration.
    “ Sorry,” she whispered.
    “ Not a problem.” I blinked the tears out of my eyes and then looked down the dark corridor.
    “ We should explore the cave for evidence of Tyler,” she said. “We can look for a way out at the same time.”
    I wasn’t about to argue. If there was any way out of here that didn’t involve swimming, I was all for it. I thought Miranda was right about swimming out, especially for me. The strong current would smash me to pieces or simply push me back into the cave.
     

Chapter 10. Max
     
    The cavern was a rough triangular corridor with the ceiling somewhere high above in the darkness. It looked like the foundation of the earth had cracked and shifted, and like the slabs of stone we walked between were waiting to smash back together at any moment. The floor was uneven, covered with loose debris and large sheets of rock that the walls had shed. At one point, the cavern’s walls became very narrow and we had to shuffle sideways through. Further along, we had to crawl on our bellies. After what seemed an eternity to me in that tight passage, we eventually stood up in a large open room.
    The low ceiling stretched like a dome over us, touching the rugged floor dozens of feet away in each direction. Nothing about this cavern looked artificial, and there were no obvious exits. Even the way we had crawled in was difficult to make out after taking a few steps. I realized that the different crevices in the walls all looked the